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The Hunt for The Amazing Spider-Man is On!

What began as a launch for the new trailer for the upcoming movie, The Amazing Spider-Man, has quickly turned into a scavenger hunt gone viral.

Within the trailer, obscured by quick moving lights and explosion of sound, there were hidden words that read, “Mark of the Spider-Man” If you go to the website for “markofthespider-man.com”, you’ll end up at a website with six static filled screens and the new rebooted spider-man logo. I’m not sure who’s goal in life it is to find these things, but day-uhm! There’s no way I could have seen that with my ADHD. This type of marketing has been reminiscent of last years viral treasure hunt for the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Using the same words, you can find the site’s matching Twitter feed @MarkofSpiderman, which has been tweeting longitude and latitude coordinates for several major US cities. Each of these coordinates pointed to a comic book shop accompanied by the message, “Propery of Peter Parker… Lost”.

In a turn of luck for one comic book reporter; not me, never me; one of the shops turned out to be a local area distributor, Secret Headquarters in Silverlake, Los Angeles. The SuperHeroHype’s reporter made a quick sprint down the street to find a discarded backpack.

Yes, secret hidden messages, codes to break, a country that is overtly suspicious of packages and then a discarded backpack in one of six major U.S. Cities.

Instead of returning the backpack or trying to find them; it clearly says Property of Peter Parker on it; the contents were looted. Inside contained: Safety goggles (They do nothing!), Physics and Chemistry textbooks, keys, a MetroCard, a notebook loaded with class notes, sunglasses, drawing pencils, a pencil sharpener, a sketchbook, a binder, film canisters, photo contact sheets and a small canister of what appear to be watch parts; probably to make his web shooters look all steam punk. There are even running shoes in the bag, all modified of course for, uhm… special needs. I would like to take this opportunity to note that the sketchbook which contains preliminary drawings of the Spider-Man costume has a mask that looks like Strong Bad’s of Home Star Runner. Also the bag does not contain any sewing equipment or space age costume material that I have gripped about. You can read that article here.

Parker also collected some well crafted Daily Bugle clippings about a certain masked vigilante, including one that reads, “This letter will be the first of many, and the first letter is always key.” When applying the cipher of first letter to the black block of text, it reads “slashprepare” which I can only assume is a reference back to the viral website. So here I went typing in /prepare. This sent me to a a screen that looks like its telling you to click on the six screen in a particular order.

I did that. Nothing. Turns out that it’s already been triggered and each screen now shows the name of the cities in question and an ominous countdown timer for each.

Meanwhile, in another part of town… The film is set for release on July 3rd and stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Irrfan Khan, with Martin Sheen and Sally Field. Directed by Marc Webb; heh, Webb of Spier-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man arrives with a screenplay written by James Vanderbilt, based on the Marvel comic by Stan Lee.

Here’s the official movie synopsis for The Amazing Spider-Man:

The Amazing Spider-Man is the story of Peter Parker (Garfield), an outcast high schooler who was abandoned by his parents as a boy, leaving him to be raised by his Uncle Ben (Sheen) and Aunt May (Field). Like most teenagers, Peter is trying to figure out who he is and how he got to be the person he is today. Peter is also finding his way with his first high school crush, Gwen Stacy (Stone), and together, they struggle with love, commitment, and secrets. As Peter discovers a mysterious briefcase that belonged to his father, he begins a quest to understand his parents’ disappearance – leading him directly to Oscorp and the lab of Dr. Curt Connors (Ifans), his father’s former partner. As Spider-Man is set on a collision course with Connors’ alter-ego, The Lizard, Peter will make life-altering choices to use his powers and shape his destiny to become a hero.

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About Leo Choy

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Leo Choy stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished.
He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Leo can see and hear. And so, Leo finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.